Avoiding fragments

Company prides itself on improving how information is stored on hard drives.

June 28, 2010|By Michael J. Arvizu, michael.arvizu@latimes.com

For most computer users, a drop in system efficiency generally happens when the machine has been used for months or years.

Disk fragmentation occurs. The bits of data on a hard drive can become disorganized, forcing the drive to work harder to find the information the user is looking for. This overheats the drive, consumes more electricity and decreases productivity.

For the people at Burbank-based Diskeeper Corporation, which is celebrating its 30th year in business, defragmented drives are the cornerstone of their business.

Advertisement

"If you think about how computers have evolved over time, they have gotten faster," said Howard Butler, a vice president at Diskeeper. "But still, they're not as fast as they possibly could be given the way in which information is stored on the disk drives. Our claim to fame is being able to improve that."

Diskeeper's history can be traced back to 1981, when it was known as Executive Software International Inc. Later renamed Diskeeper, the company moved to Montrose in 1988, then into offices on Brand Boulevard in Glendale in 1991. The company moved to Burbank in 2001.

Diskeeper was the first company to develop defragmentation software for hard drives, said Butler, beginning in 1985. One of the biggest complaints customers had at the time was slow computer performance. But nothing could be done about it until the end of the day or weekend. Most of these complaints would be fielded by now-defunct Digital Equipment Corporation, one of the largest computer manufacturers at the time.

"When a disk defragments, it becomes very slow; it'd be like taking your bedroom of your home and putting it on one block and your kitchen, putting it over several blocks down the street," said Pacific BMW of Glendale IT Manager Peter Duffy. "So when the disk has to hunt to find those files, they're not contiguous, they're fragmented."

In 1981, to defragment a computer system's drive, the system would be taken offline. The hard drive's content would then be backed up onto a pair of reel-to-reel magnetic tapes. Then the hard drive would be reformatted and the backed-up files replaced onto the drive. This process would have to be done late at night or during the weekend by a system administrator.